You're Doin' a Heckuva Job, Hurricane Karen

Karen Hughes was in Indonesia, in her new role at State, selling the U.S. to the Muslim world, defending the Iraq invasion to Indonesian students. In doing so she, er, got her facts wrong. Here's what she said:

"The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat," she said. "After all, he used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas."

Now, of course, Saddam (probably) did gas the Kurds back in the 1980s. But he didn't murder hundreds of thousands of people with the gas. Most of those people were probably shot, stabbed, etc.--killed by non-WMD means. What we have here is a blending of two separate rationalizations for the war: (1) Saddam was a mass murdered; and (2) Saddam used WMD on his own people. The best part of the story is that it's not clear, to me, that Hughes simply misspoke. It looks to me like she didn't know the facts:

Hours later, Hughes was asked twice for the basis for her numbers during a meeting with journalists from foreign news organizations.

"It's something that our U.S. government has said a number of times in the past. It's information that was used very widely after his attack on the Kurds. I believe it was close to 300,000," Hughes said when questioned the first time. She added, "That's something I said every day in the course of the campaign. That's information that we talked about a great deal in America."

When asked again several minutes later, she said, "I think it was almost 300,000. It's my recollection. They were put in mass graves."

Here, we see that Hurricane Karen (that was one of GWB's nicknames for Hughes, although I'm sure it's not used any more) admits that she made erroneous, false, and misleading statements of fact every day in the course of the campaign. Well, I certainly thought so, but this pretty much cinches it.

Finally, someone had to "clear things up":

By late in the day, Hughes's aide, Gordon D. Johndroe, offered a correction.

"She was referring to Saddam Hussein having killed hundreds of thousands of people. The gassing part of that was a fraction," said Johndroe, director of strategic communications and planning in the State Department's public affairs bureau. "She was combining two numbers and two situations. She wasn't trying to rewrite the story or make a new claim."

But, if Hughes really said this, every day during the campaign, then that story has already been rewritten, Gord.

Link.